Less is more! More is less!!

 No, the title of the blog today is not a clever game on words. No, it is not a quote from George Orwell's "1984". Neither is it my attempt to prove how good I am at using that unique figure of speech called oxymoron. Rather it is a response to realities faced these days as a reader. What is this trend currently popular?

Well, very few people 'read' now-a-days. Most people 'hear' books these days. Yes, you read it right. People prefer to hear literary texts. Oh, yes, as for the other 'diy' kinda texts, they choose to hear the summaries!

Personally, I am not comfortable with the idea of listening to a literary text. Yes, the reader has a voice quality one may not like. The pronunciation may be awful. The word stress, sentence stress, intonation may be such that the whole read grates on one's ears. 

The worst part of this 'listen as read' stuff is that one inevitably gets to hear the reader's interpretation. Often it may not exactly be the okay type, forget the excellent variety.  When one reads on one's own, one is re-creating the writer's universe in one's own unique imaginative way. Listening to a literary text is like watching a film based on a great literary text. Most often than not, it is inferior in quality. In this sense, more is less!

Think of it from a larger perspective though. Suppose, one is visually impaired. Such an atrophy is always balanced by a hypertrophy. Most often, it would be an auditory finesse. For such a person, a speaking text that he/she can listen to is a godsend. In that sense, such more can never be less.

In other words, one should never ever generalise, I think. Every generalisation is an over-simplification that lacks the acuity and finesse of a thought-through opinion. It is intellectual laziness, in brief. Such a general perception may appear more, but it is always less!

Pratima@As for the speaking texts, it is, I suppose, a matter of developing a taste for it. May be, one should initially choose texts 'read' by the best in the field so that the psychological resistance to it could be overcome, and one can 'listen' to, rather than 'read' a text if and when necessary and/or inevitable. Anyways, something is better than nothing! Less is always more!